The invention relates generally to service catalog, and more particularly relates to actionable information technology (IT) service catalog framework.
The IT Service catalog is a solution that helps IT organizations showcases the value of IT services they deliver to their business customers. It focuses specifically on articulating and documenting these services, facilitating service request and fulfillment and modeling/modifying service portfolios.
The disconnect between business goals and IT priorities consistently ranks among the top three issues facing chief information officers (CIOs) year after year. At the heart of this problem is a lack of trust between customers and IT, where Business customers and end-users do not trust that IT organization is capable of taking the business forward. Faced by these challenges, many IT organizations are in the midst of transforming to a customer-centric & demand-driven service model. Service Catalog is essentially the first step—and a fundamental requirement—in transforming the IT organization by re-establish the trust between IT and Business
IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) V2 & V3 provides an overview of the need for a Service Catalog, however there is no practical guidance on how to build and manage them.
Service catalog products and software tools available in the market provide a variety of functionalities for organizations to help them configure services. However they do not provide the step-by-step guidance to implement services, in alignment with service stakeholders and customer needs, and manage them in the catalog.
During Service Catalog adoption, large IT organizations typically face the following challenges: Determining the scope of services and identification of service owners; Understanding the mapping of Multiple vendors' and internal IT services, for bundling into the Service Catalog; Define to-be state for services and manage their overall lifecycle; and Drive improvements to services and the catalog.
Organizations tried to address the Service Catalog implementation from a conventional technology solution standpoint, assuming that the technology will enable them to design and manage services end-to-end. However there were many critical aspects with respect to the program that the technology or even the best practices framework like ITIL cannot address.
Due to the lack of reference standards in this area, organizations are increasingly looking at practitioner guidance and direction in building and managing actionable service catalogs.
Hence, there was need for strategic framework that provides end to end guidance to manage the lifecycle of services through service discovery and drive improvements to the service experience and customer satisfaction. The proposed framework components enable an organization to jumpstart and manage a service catalog program end-to-end.